


Throw Your Soul Through Every Open Door

by feverbeats



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M, Transfic Mini Fest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-31
Updated: 2011-05-31
Packaged: 2017-10-19 22:43:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverbeats/pseuds/feverbeats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rebecca is young and desperate when he meets Ethan Rayne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Throw Your Soul Through Every Open Door

Standing in the dusty costume shop, Ethan Rayne says, “It’s been too long, Rebecca.”

Would it have hurt less if he’d called Rupert _Ripper?_ No, but it would have hurt differently.

Ethan has no other name for Rupert to wield. He’s always been Ethan.

*

Rebecca is young and desperate when he meets Ethan Rayne.

“I,” he says, trying to force himself not to stutter, “Can you teach me to do magic?”

Ethan smiles like a cat. He’s wearing a fitted sleeveless shirt with safety pins in it and he doesn’t bind his breasts. “Yes,”

He teaches Rebecca a lot of things. He teaches him about drugs, about summoning, about how to use illusions so that your voice and curves don’t give you away.

He calls Rebecca _Ripper_ , and it feels so good not to be Rebecca any more.

But Ripper wants more. He wants what Ethan has somehow never thought to strive for: a different body.

It’s late, very late, one night after their little group (all boys like Ripper and Ethan) have summoned Eyghon. Ripper feels exhausted, much as if he’d just had sex. (To tell the truth, he’s starting to prefer those nights to the nights they summon the demon. He doesn’t think Ethan feels the same.)

“Ethan?” he says. He’s pressed against Ethan’s side in the dark of the warehouse they’ve been using to summon the demon. The others are asleep. The bandages around Ripper’s chest are digging into his skin uncomfortably—seven hours and counting of binding today.

“Mm?”

“Been thinking.” Ripper clears his throat and squeezes Ethan’s wrist. “There’s a lot more to magic than what we’ve been doing, yeah?”

Ethan turns to him, brown furrowed with what looks like apprehensiveness, but Ethan is never apprehensive. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“There might be—” Ripper sighs. “Right, look, I might as well say it. Is there a way to change your body?”

Ethan’s expression relaxes visibly. “Oh. I don’t know. I imagine there’s a way to do bloody near anything you like if you want it enough.”

But Ripper knows there’s more to it than just _wanting_. Ethan taught him that right at the start. There’s also sacrifice and an exchange of power, and usually there’s blood.

He finds the spell after two and a half weeks of searching. He doesn’t tell Ethan what he’s doing, and even years later, he’s not sure why. Maybe it just feels like too private a thing. Maybe he’s afraid that Ethan, always so confident in his male body that looks female, wouldn’t understand.

The spell hurts. There is blood. There is sacrifice. A week later, the summoning of Eyghon goes wrong and Randall dies.

By the time Ripper finds the Watcher’s Council, he’s become Rupert, distancing himself from every identity that was never his.

*

And years later, in the costume shop, Rupert barely recognizes Ethan. He must have done something somewhere along the line, because his voice is deeper, in a more real way than the illusion Rupert learned to look through. Ethan’s chest is flat, too, not that Rupert is looking. That means either binding or—He wonders if Ethan tracked down the same spell, paid the same price. He hates that when Ethan’s there, Rupert is twenty years old again, hating his body and his powerlessness against the darkness around him.

There’s a difference now, though. Rupert knows what’s in the darkness, and he now knows better than to befriend it.


End file.
